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Virgin America Uses Linux to Entertain Inflight

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the slow-steady-creep dept.

anomalous cohort writes "CrunchGear has an interesting interview with the Director of Inflight Entertainment for the airline Virgin America, who discusses their adoption of Linux for the passenger's seat back computers. 'The ability to compose a music-video playlist is pretty cool and on the horizon. The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.'"

15 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Ob by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wheareas Arab airlines use 72 virgins...

  2. Old news by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Informative

    Delta and Continental have been using linux based systems for years. I know this because they ended up rebooting a lot and you get to see a nice penguin when it does.

    --
    Monstar L
    1. Re:Old news by Jafar00 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Also Swiss Air, and Qatar Airlines from my recent experience. The Linux based in flight entertainment system is becoming a familiar sight and something I look forward to when flying longer haul sections of flight.

      --
      RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
    2. Re:Old news by alpharouge · · Score: 5, Funny

      On a finnair flight from Helsinki to Tokyo last summer they appeared to be running linux on the personal touch-screen devices too. It worked great and it was good fun watching a few flicks on it.
      However, about an hour or two before the end of the flight they started rebooting over and over again - they were running some red hat variant on 266MHz devices if memory serves me right. The screens up at the end of the walkways rebooted at that time too, but seemed to be running windows, cant remember what variant though.

      After ten minutes of rebooting I was secretly hoping the stewardesses would make an announcement to ask if there was a systems engineer on the plane... :)

    3. Re:Old news by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Funny

      You kidding? He lets anyone and everyone see what hes hiding under his frontend, exposing himself like that.

  3. Oh dear. by Funkcikle · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why do articles like this always remind of those people who used to write into Amiga Format saying they saw an Amiga in some movie or television show?

    "It even had the A570 expansion next to it, but the machine itself was the A1200 which is incompatible! It was AWESOME!"

    1. Re:Oh dear. by jamesh · · Score: 4, Funny

      Doom? They should at least be running a flight simulator of some sort. That way they never have to ask "by the way, does anyone here know how to fly a plane?". They can just check the flight sim stats and tap the person with the best score on the shoulder...

  4. Microsoft Gorilla Propganda. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    No. It was Windows. You see, Microsoft colluded with the developers of that software to crash and show the penguin. This was done to "show" all the business travelers that Linux is horribly unstable. See, you fell for it yourself. It was just FUD put there by Microsoft. Really.

  5. Re:that figures by IchBinEinPenguin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Virgin the ultimate middlemen
    they own nothing (no assets) except a brand name

    so using free Linux is an obvious choice, but where is the source code ? have they contributed ? i think not

    Arguably they contributed the only thing they own, a brand-name.
    Associating Linux with a successful brand is a Good Thing for Linux

    their entire business is based on re-selling other peoples stuff (music/mobile/broadband/planes),
    why deal with them when you can buy direct ?

    skip the middleman

    I tried that once, but no-one wanted to lease me 1/300'th of a Jumbo...

  6. Virgin America... by spidr_mnky · · Score: 5, Funny

    Virgin America Uses Linux... Just for a moment, I thought this referred to a demographic.
  7. Re:that figures by Nullav · · Score: 4, Funny

    Associating Linux with a successful brand is a Good Thing for Linux
    But we already have people associating Linux with virgins. Hardly a contribution.
    --
    I just read Slashdot for the articles.
  8. Fail! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    You missed such an easy one-liner:

    "Linux America Uses Virgins to Entertain Inflight"

  9. Re:that figures by IchBinEinPenguin · · Score: 5, Funny

    But we already have people associating Linux with virgins. Hardly a contribution.br
    http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/9/linux_laid.html

    Read it and weep bitter, bitter tears of envy!

  10. NetBSD @ Panasonic Aviations by hubertf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    FYI, Panasonic Aviations uses g4u, a NetBSD-based harddisk image cloning software to deploy their in-flight systems.

    For more information on g4u, see http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

      - Hubert
          Author or g4u

  11. Re:Several features not available by zenyu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have to agree. I flew VA a couple months back and the killer features, like web browsing were just not online yet.. The in satellite reception was also not so great, JetBlue does a better job there.

    I did enjoy the classic games running in MAME. But that also lacked polish, they didn't do a good job mapping the keys for the various games, and you couldn't hit meta keys so you couldn't reconfigure the key bindings yourself.

    They also used black 000000h as their XVideo chromakey, which meant that when the video kept going when you were in some other app the video would leak into that app. If they had used 010101h instead this issue wouldn't exist and you would still get a black screen rather than a nasty blue or green one when video was starting up.

    Overall, it was a good flight. The flight attendants were amazingly attentive. Who ever did the hiring should get a gold star.